Posted by Tom on 2008-10-17

Every now and then I find myself in the situation where I need to create a new app from scratch. It’s then that I get to sample the full Hobo experience. And I have to say – wow. Seriously. WOW.

Top priority right now with Hobo is to churn out as much documentation in as short a time as humanly possible. We felt we needed a home for all these docs - a simple app that supports user-comments, requests for documentation, searching etc. Sounds like a distraction from actually writing the docs? : ) Well… what if it only took a day? How much of an app could you turn out in a single day?

Quite a lot, it turns out.

The experience of creating the Hobo Cookbook was literally a rush for me. It really felt like we’re reaching the point where app-development is fast enough that you can sit down side-by-side with the client and have them guide you towards the app they really want and need. Hobo is coming together. In particular the DRYML generators introduced in 0.8 made everything so much easier.The really encouraging part was that it never felt like Hobo was penning me in. Whatever small tweak I wanted to make in order to improve the app, I was able to quickly achieve without discarding the rest of the automatically generated stuff.

But enough of this idle banter. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: - The Hobo Cookbook

It’s even open source, so it provides documentation in more ways than one!Now we just need to populate it, so that you folks can all learn how to build apps in a single day : )